Twitter says 4 executives are leaving the company

Twitter had 320 million active users at the end of September, which was just four million more than three months earlier.

Those confirmed leaving the company are Katie Stanton, who headed up Twitter’s media department, Alex Roetter, who headed up the engineering division, Jason Toff, who led the Vine product, and Kevin Weil, who headed up product.

As part of the change, The New York Times says it plans to appoint new board members and a “high-profile media personality” as one of its new directors. Along with that the company is slated to announce names of some new board members and also the new PR head.

Following rumours that a number of executives have left Twitter, CEO Jack Dorsey took to the microblogging site to confirm the news and clear up some of the false rumours around the news.

Analysts have lauded quicker product development under Dorsey, such as the launch of Moments, which showcases Twitter’s best tweets and content, but lamented that the new products are not attracting new users. A spokeswoman for the company declined to comment apart from what was in the statement.

Dorsey added that the current CTO, Messinger will look over the entire group of consumer product and engineering, research user service, design service and make it into one.

Dorsey in October past year had spoken about “hiring and investing in talent” and the need for “bold rethinking”.

Saying the four had chosen to leave, Dorsey said he would work closely with COO Adam Bain, who will take on product, media, and HR responsibilities in their absence.

Twitter’s stock has been under pressure for months, as the company struggles to boost user growth. A major outage last week sent the stock way down, to $17.73 – far below its initial public offering price of $26 per share. Instagram is a photo-sharing app owned by Facebook.

Several sources also revealed that Twitter may also unveil other executive changes, including the appointment of a new chief marketing officer.

Dorsey helped invent Twitter in 2006 and imposed a 140-character limit on messages so the service would be easy to use on cellphones that had 160-character limits on texts at that time.